The News Is Not Good For `Dreams`

Big-city police reporters are dual citizens of an elite club and a never- ending emotional boot camp--a job well done can involve relaying the details of eight children dead in a Christmas Day fire.

Gera-Lind Kolarik, an assignment editor at WLS-Ch. 7 and a veteran of several local news shops, examines that ambivalence in ``Shattered Dreams,`` a new play being presented at the Chicago Press Club as a benefit for the organization`s scholarship fund.

She has got her facts straight: the innumerable alarms that turn out to be mattress fires; the awkward calls to unsuspecting neighbors who may or may not agree to look out the window and remark on a blaze next door; the roller coaster excitement and easy bonhomie of a holiday newsroom; the empty feeling of triumph after snapping a great photograph of a mother in grief.

Unfortunately, Kolarik makes a better reporter than dramatist.

``Shattered Dreams`` is a slice-of-life look at a fictional Chicago newsroom on Christmas, and it`s as cliche-ridden and mawkishly sentimental as it is, for the most part, unbelievable.

There`s Wayne (Tom Webb), a heavy-drinking city editor heartless on and off the job; Lillian (Diane Rudall), the veteran reporter now reduced to animal stories and doubts; Dan (Mark Richard), an eager novice ready to race out at the first tingle of a box alarm; and Arthur (Brent Shaphren), an established photographer who inexplicably never learned how to avoid nausea after an unpleasant assignment.

Kolarik begins with a nicely natural banter, but quickly the whole thing degenerates into preachy soap opera. Wayne comes down hard on young Dan as an upstart college grad, only to soften when Dan comes back from a fire with choice details: The old timer and the new kid clasp hands. Lillian chides Wayne for his drunkenness and their muddied love affair, blaming him for entering into a bad marriage while dooming her to a life of career-only spinsterhood. (Apparently nobody told her she could always marry somebody else.)

Like a lot of bad occupational dramas, ``Shattered Dreams`` is too busy exposing the inner sufferings of a workplace to present sketches of real human beings. Most veteran crime reporters deal with the tightrope of their profession internally--they don`t explode after years on the job with bellowing (and painful) soliloquies. Nor do they lose their temper when their story about an old lady loses front-page space to a tragic fire. That`s why they are what they are--they can deal with daily history with a keen sense of perspective.

The performers, under Arnie Zaks` direction, handle their breezy realism all right. Richard is quite good as the young reporter, and Rudall has a touching truthfulness until she`s called upon to deliver Medea-like diatribes. Webb is sturdy, although his part is one of the hardest to swallow. Maybe that`s because the image here was so indelibly and better presented many years ago in the unforgettable character of Walter Burns, the gruff and unscrupulous newspaper editor in ``The Front Page,`` a newsroom drama that worked.

``SHATTERED DREAMS``

A drama by Gera-Lind Kolarik, directed by Arnie Saks, sets and lighting by Earl E. Frischkorn III and sound design by John List. Opened Sept. 5 at the Chicago Press Club, 410 N. Michigan Ave., and plays at 8:15 p.m. Monday through Friday, through Sept. 20. Length of performance, 1:15. Dinner-theater tickets are $22 for club members; $30 for nonmembers. Phone 787-7500.